BJP’s Fate in North-East Depends on Tripura Election
Sankar
The crucial Assembly election in Tripura is going to be held on 16th February. To understand the blatant truth that the ruling BJP-IPFT combine is in deep trouble no one had to be a rocket scientist. The erstwhile Chief Minister Biplab Dev had to be replaced by Manik Saha who changed his shirt from Congress to BJP in 2016. BJP came in power in 2018 in Tripura not due to a total failure of the erstwhile Left Front government who ruled the state for successive five terms, but based on a much higher expectation which has been shattered in the last five years. On the other hand CPIM, the main opposition party has regained the confidence of the masses in a vast portion of the state.
The Background
Tripura is a small (third smallest) state of India with a population of only 41 lakhs. Under British rule it was a Princely State. The plain areas of the state became a part of Comilla district of erstwhile east Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and hill area (hill Tippera) came to an agreement with the Indian state and became a Union Territory in 1949. It was converted into a full fledged state in 1971. It should be noted that the state was basically a tribal dominated region at the time of its joining into the Indian Republic. However, the percentage of tribal population has been decreasing from the first half of the last centuries due to influx of the Bengali population. In 1901 the population of the area was only 1.73 lakh with the tribals making up almost 53 percent of the whole. In 1941 the total population rose to 5.13 lakh with a tribal population of 51 percent. However, after the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971, the huge influx of Bengali refugees from Bangladesh totally changed the whole demography of the state and the percentage of tribal population came down to 28 percent. Therefore it can be understood very easily that the successful combination of refugee politics and the politics of ethnicity is the key to political success for any political force in the state.
Communist Party and Ethnicity
This is an unfortunate fact in the Indian communist movement, since its inception, never understood the class question in a living manner. Rather it understood the question absolutely economically. Therefore, the Party always undermined the struggle of caste, gender and ethnicity. However, in Tripura it was a different story altogether. The undivided communist party took up the ethnicity question very seriously and understood it as an integral part of democratic revolution. Therefore, the Party could assimilate the ethnicity struggle into the larger horizon of struggle for communism. At that time the Party was a master in creative politics and formed different useful platforms to launch and lead many particular struggles in different parts of the country. As a part of these experiments in Tripura the Party launched several socio-political platforms to work among the tribals. In 1938 the Jana Mangal Samity (Organization for Mass Welfare) was formed followed by Jana Siksha Samity (Organization for Mass Education) in 1945 and Tripura Praja Mandal (People’s Committee of Tripura) in 1946. Spreading education was one of the important aims of the Party in tribal areas at that time. Side by side large scale social welfare programmes were taken to spread the relief work among the tribal masses in order to uplift the general living condition of the people. The cumulative effect of all these works was the development of political consciousness of the tribal masses which gave birth to another important organization, Gana Mukti Parishad (Mass Emancipation Committee) which led a four-year-long armed struggle against the Princely administration and the Indian state under the direct supervision of the Party.
In this period the main demand of the tribal people of the state was their separate homeland. The question was in flux as the integration of Tripura with the Indian state was not completed by then and all possibilities were open. The armed struggle led by Gana Mukti Parishad was also in line with the Party’s overall call of armed uprising against the Indian state under the leadership of BT Ranadive. However, after 1950 both of the questions were settled as Tripura became a part of India and the Ranadive line of armed uprising was abandoned by the Party. In this phase the Party went into another magnificent experiment to raise the demand of the tribal’s share of resources, like land, forest etc. After the Liberation War broke out in 1971 in Bangladesh the heavy influx of Bengali refugees started to take place and the political situation changed once again. On the one hand the overall pressure on the state’s economy was increasing and the percentage of the tribal people in the demographic structure was decreasing very fast on the other. However, in this phase as well the Party (CPIM) worked fairly well to combine the works among the tribal masses and the works among the incoming Bengali refugees. As a result the leadership of the Party came from both the sections and a strong unity between tribal and nontribal sections of the population was intact despite the growing insecurity felt by the tribal masses.
However after coming to power in 1977 the Party gradually started to take more and more conventional mainstream political positions in all the questions including so called development projects, tribals’ share in the state resources etc. This problem was aggravated in the second innings of its rule (1993-2018) after a brief gap from 1988 to 1993. The conflict over the Gumti River Hydel Project has remained the most vital issue in this regard. Nearly 40,000 tribal people lost their lands due to the project whereas not even one fourth of them received any compensation due to their failure to provide necessary papers to claim the ownership over the land. Huge protests and resistance broke out and the Left government unleashed oppressive measures to crush the movement. This incident brought forth one another important issue. The papers of ownership to a vast section of sharecroppers, tribals and marginal cultivators were supposed to be provided by the government under land reforms programmes. However, the Gumti project movement showed very clearly that despite the most advertised land reforms claims of the Lefts remained hollow in most parts of the state, especially in the tribal areas.
It does not mean that the state government under Left Front did not take up positive steps towards socio-economic development. According to many social indicators the state came to top. Tripura is one of the highest ranking states in literacy. The overall economy was systemized which gave a boost to the revenue collection. As a result the government employees started to get systemic and stable income. In return the domestic market flourished and trade situations could be stable. However, all these steps majorly benefited the middle class and the Bengali population including the refugee masses saw upward social mobility.
However, these socio economic changes increased the domination of Bengali middle class (Bhadralok) over the society, administration and the Communist Party. The hard earned unity between tribal and non-tribal people faced a huge rift and as the Party gradually became the Party of Bengali badralok the rift between two sections of the population gradually turned as the rift between the Party and the tribal masses. Therefore, the glorious legacy of the Tripura model (as it was coined by a crucial document of undivided Communist Party document of 1951 on the tactical question) to assimilate the ethnicity question in communist imagination has come to an end. Similar fate of the Party in the hill area of West Bengal over the demand of Gorkhaland in the middle of 1980s can be taken as a referring point.
BJP’s Rise and Debacle
Once social mobility started to gear up the middle class started to search for newer opportunities in the era of neo-liberalism. After Narendra Modi came to power in the Central government in 2014 BJP started to endeavor in the North East with renewed vigor. They started promising the fortune seeker middle class Acche din, the high sounding stories of golden future under so called double engined government which helped them to make imroad among the Bengali bhadralok section. The tribal population feeling deprived under the LF government also started to be inclined to BJP. Although the relation between IPFT (Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura) and RSS was not smooth in the past, an eventual cooperation was developed between them. After the Narendra Modi government came into power in 2014 the expectations from BJP reached the highest level among the deprived population throughout the Northeast and using the growing isolation of the LF government and the CPIM party from the masses, the BJP-IPFT alliance came into power in the state in 2018. The election was held in 59 seats out of total 60 seats and the Saffron Party bagged 35 seats and its ally IPFT got 8 seats which enabled them to oust the LF government. Among the Left Front parties only CPIM got 16 seats, others could not open their account at all.
However within three years of coming into power the BJP government started to face deep problems. To meet the expectations of the people in the state was not an easy task as it was too high. It was a direct consequence of the Left rule which did fairly well in many sectors. The irrational promises made by the central leadership including the Prime Minister in front of the election proved absolute Jumla to a large extent. The cumulative effect of note-ban, GST and a long spell of Covid made the state economy horrible. The party has failed to show concrete remedies for the economic woes. The rate of unemployment goes to the highest level. The state government employees are not getting DA for a long time. The promise for overall economic development has proved to be a distant dream. Instead of facing the situation boldly and creatively the Chief Minister Biplab Dev had chosen the shortcut way by playing religious card which he learned from the central leadership. He started claiming absurd things about the past glory of Bharata at the time of Mahabharata and Ramayana. As a consequence Mr. Deb lost popularity very fast.
Secondly, it must be understood that BJP is such a Party which has no root in a vast portion in India including Eastern, Northeastern and Southern parts of the country. Only North India is its natural place. And the Party which is deeply embedded in the Brahministic heritage doesn’t understand these areas and doesn’t want to understand. They only resort to the political gimmicks and use their robust financial muscle to capture power. Therefore, most of the party bosses in the entire Northeast are basically gold diggers who have come from the other parties seeking for better opportunities for accumulating power and money. As Biplab Deb lost his popularity among the masses the infight within the party started in a big way which paved the way to stage the episode of replacement of the CM.
Present Situation
Meanwhile the tribal masses have been disillusioned to BJP to a large extent as they got nothing but empty promises in the last five years. As a result distancing from BJP a very large section of the population is now supporting another tribal organization called Tipraha Indigenous Progressive Regional Alliance, commonly known as TIPRA or Tipra Motha. Under the leadership of Pradyot Manikya Debbarman, the present head of the royal family which ruled Tripura under the name of Manikya dynasty for many centuries, Tipra Motha defeated both the BJP and the CPI(M) in the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council elections held in April 2021. The TIPRA and its then ally the Indigenous Nationalist Party of Twipra (which has since merged with the party) won a total of 18 out of the 28 elected council seats. The BJP was restricted to 9 seats and the CPI(M) was completely washed out, unable to win any seats, losing their supermajority of 25 seats in the 30-seat council and a decline from 49 per cent votes in the previous council election to 12 per cent. A large section of tribal youths are attracted to this new tribal party in the state. This time 80,000 new youth voters were added to the list. For an obvious reason the youth voters are going to play a very important role in this election. Most of the political analysts opine that the mood of the youth voters are majorly anti-BJP. The impact of growing tribal disillusionment on the ruling parties can be understood from the political developments which caused the IPFT, BJP’s ally, to lose three of its MLAs: Dhananjoy Tripura, Brishaketu Debbarma and Mevar Kumar Jamatia. The three leaders have joined the Tipra Motha. The success of Tipra Motha probably lies in the fact that it has gone back to the old demand of the tribal people for a separate tribal homeland. The demand of the ‘Greater Tipraland’ is going to be the key issue in the tribal dominated areas. BJP is also trying to reach an agreement with Tripra Motha, sensing its advancement in the tribal areas. However, till now this effort is not successful to yield any positive result.
On the other hand the opposition parties including the Left front and Congress, along with the civil society jointly appealed to the people to fight saffron forces to ‘save democracy and Constitution’. Senior leaders, including CPM secretary Jitendra Chaudhury, CPI(M-L) national general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya, Congress MLA Sudip Roy Barman, former Congress MLA Asish Kumar Saha and other leaders of the Forward Bloc and Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) shared the dais at a programme to mark 75 years of independence in Agartala very recently. “We want all secular and democratic forces to come together to fight against the BJP and RSS in order to save democracy and the Constitution. And it is possible,” A jubilant Chaudhury said, alleging that there is a planned effort to implement fascism in India. The Lefts have gained most of their strongholds using the debacle of BJP facing the growing political violence in the state. It should be noted that despite its poor performance in the 2018’s election CPIM bagged 42.22 percent of vote share, only 1.37 percent less than BJP. Therefore if the party can build up an overall consensus among the non-tribal population to resist BJP unitedly and simultaneously can bridge the tribal non-tribal rift by creatvely negotiating the demands of tribal masses by resorting its old heritage of combination politics between ethnicity and egalitarianism, BJP undoubtedly is going lose its power. Now everything depends on the political maturity of the party leaders. As per latest news, the seat sharing agreement between CPIM and Congress is going smoothly in spite of some minor disputes. But no agreement with Tipra is still in sight.
